1. design

How does the look and feel of the web site strike you, ignoring such factors as load time and navigation? Is the color scheme pleasing and unobtrusive? Can you read all of the words on the page easily, without background colors and/or images impeding your reading? Are there annoying animated gifs all over the place, distracting your eyes from reading the content? Are mouseovers required to use the site, and if so, is it intuitive to the visitor that they have to move the cursor over an image to get something to happen? Does the site have a splash page? If so, does it help the site or hurt it? The resulting score is a 0-20 point score, based strictly on the judges opinion.

2. navigation

Can you easily get around the web site and not get lost? Can you get back to the home page or main navigational page easily from anywhere within the site? How easy is it for a non-member checking this organization out to find the essential information about this organization? How easy is it for a member / frequent visitor to find up-to-date information or information they are likely to revisit often (e.g. records, member lists, calendar, news)? The score is a 0-20 point score, with up to 10 points given for overall ease of navigation and up to 10 points given for ease of finding the most essential information for a variety of visitors (potential members finding membership info, members finding results, etc.).

3. content

Rate the content of this site. All sites need to have membership / contact information, preferably including membership forms and instructions on how to fill them out/who to send to if necessary. Not having this information should deduct up to 5 points from this category. Other points should be deducted for not having a schedule/calendar of events or having one that is severely outdated (3), not having event results (3), not having records (2), not having officer / contact listings (2), not having workout times for team sites (3), not having pool locations/directions for team sites (3), and possibly others. These are just essential items that belong there. Additional points are awarded for extra content that is out of the ordinary, such as good training articles or an interactive area such as a discussion forum or regular chat session, or an excellent picture gallery. It is important to evaluate this category from the perspective of the three main customers: potential members, members, and visitors from other LMSCs/clubs. The first two are obviously more important than the third

4. speed / load time

This category is limited to one vote based on the average page load time for the home page (not a splash page) found at websitegarage.com for 56K modems. The score is given on a continuous scale with the following breakpoints:

-less than 5 seconds:	20 points
-less than 10 seconds:	15-19 points
-less than 20 seconds:	10-14 points
-less than 60 seconds:	5-9 points
-greater than 60 seconds:	0-4 points

If interior pages of a web site are significantly slower/faster than the home page, the evaluators discuss how to score that site.

5. technical correctness

This category is limited to one vote, using the websitegarage.com results as a guideline for the categories of HTML correctness, Browser Compatibility, Dead Links, and Spelling, assigning up to 5 points each. For each of these categories, the Web Site Garage score is adjusted based on acronyms used, and innocuous browser incompatibility issues (putting bgcolor=white in the BODY tag should not be an issue, even though some old browsers don’t recognize this). Points are also subtracted from the final score in this category for any JavaScript errors reported when browsing the site, images not found, gross content errors, or significant viewing degradation when turning off frames, JavaScript, or image loading (the Opera browser lets you do this easily), or if the page looks totally different or nonfunctional on another browser.